Nada Hoteit *

Novelistic works have snatched - albeit somewhat late - recognition of their miraculous ability to positively influence humans - to the extent of including them in some countries as a supporting treatment or even an alternative to drugs that doctors can prescribe for some psychological and physical pathological cases. After long stages of negative dealing with those works and labeling them as "waste of time", "dark", and "poison that pushes its readers to the point of adopting imaginary characters that can achieve the impossible, ending in losing their sense of reality," we moved to the stage of recognizing literature as one of the best recipes that can invest in improving the quality of the human experience to face the pressures of life, relationships, and the encroachment of materialisms. But contemporary intellectuals today - not least among them former US President Barack Obama - see that literature can form brilliant positive roles in the lives of individuals reaching a farther horizon than just beautifying their sense of themselves and their relations with the world.

"When I think of my role as a citizen, I find that I learned most of its dimensions through reading novels," President Obama says in his conversation with the American novelist Marilynne Robinson. "That must be about empathy, for novels make us more confident in accepting the idea of the world as a very complex place full of gray areas, but there is a truth whose search requires commitment, effort, and acceptance of the reality of the inevitability of communication with others despite their difference." President Obama is of course not the first to talk about the power of literature to create empathy and acceptance of the other, but what he said reveals the rising ceiling of expectations regarding a potentially highly positive role for literature in granting individuals the necessary ability to play their roles as global citizens in a global village whose houses' distances diminish day after day.

American philosopher Martha Nussbaum argues in her book "Cultivating Humanity" that literature is a basic requirement today more than ever, to qualify citizens as contributors with positive roles in the heart of the contemporary world, where empathy is the gateway to understanding and absorbing the other. She also believes that the power of literature to stimulate the imagination is undoubtedly the secret of its strength in contributing to forming civilized societies characterized by sophistication during their members' dealing with each other and with other different ones. Life experience alone gives humans limited experience to deal with the space of life, and even less experience in understanding feelings and emotions outside the self-experience. From here comes the role of literature which - as visualized by the Greek philosopher Aristotle - "does not talk about things that actually happened, but opens for us the gateways of flowing imagination to imagine what can be"! For the reader falls at the moment of drowning in the novel, involved in adopting feelings and contradictions of characters different from him living experiences and emotions beyond his ability to be exposed to, and all this leads us to realize our understanding of the other, so we absorb his motives, and we call for our empathy with him, especially in facing the problems of the existential experience.

It seems that literature also provides effective tools through unleashing the imagination, in reducing feelings of anger and tension that are a feature of our lived reality, as many of the difficulties faced by today's societies stem from our limited ability as individuals to understand the motives and choices of the other, which makes our expectations of him then characterized by much misjudgment, narcissism and absence of empathy. Therefore, the call of philosopher Nussbaum to include literary readings in all forms of education at their different levels and for all sectors of citizens acquires - in light of this understanding of the role of literature - profound importance for what it can contribute in the framework of the process of building societies aware of their members' role and their practice of a healthy common societal life. This is what fully supports what several contemporary literary critics have proposed about the deep connection between the (phenomenon) of the modern novel and the possibility of forming a democratic system in its contemporary Western form. For without the ability to imagine, and thus accept the other, it is impossible perhaps to recognize the existence of rights for others, and thus the democratic process becomes a bankrupt mobilization from any actual value in the search for common denominators, points of convergence, and building the necessary trust for a safe exchange of power.

Literature presents behavioral models and societal experiences that can be retrieved identically by a wide audience, as if they are (popular) proverbs and sayings circulated on a wide table, providing tools for classifying experiences, events and individuals by benefiting from the accumulated experience of infinite characters, but in the case of literature it tends to be deeper, more comprehensive and farther-reaching in common life. Reading novels that describe the sufferings of short human life often gives the reader the ability to possess a more effective response to facing his personal tragedies and grants him formulas for creating a common human language in understanding and absorbing dealing with challenges we all face as humans but live as individuals.

These highly optimistic expectations regarding the role of literature in contemporary life as an inevitable necessity to enable the entire democratic process also find, as in previous ages, skeptical doubters. As Andre Dao reports from the well-known American writer Kenneth Burke, despite his certainty that literary works are an important tool for managing human life, they may also cause the building of hurried and unrealistic impressions about others and our expectations of them. "Empathy and excessive understanding, and perhaps the search for common denominators with them," Dao says, "may blind on a certain level - the reader without training from seeing - the true differences between people, between societies, and even between lived experiences," some of which like gratuitous violence, slavery, rape, or ethnic cleansing cannot be truly understood by someone who hasn't suffered from them directly, because they are experiences that change humans, so they become afterwards completely different persons from their previous selves before them. Therefore, the literatures that describe them should always be read as attempts to place the reader in the context of difference - not the context of the common. Literature must, as philosopher Nussbaum says, "have the power to disturb us" and be celebrated as capable of challenging us, and taking us out of familiar feeling zones towards a space of different sensations, stimulating attention beyond the daily, fixed and expected.

Therefore, collective responsibility for human destiny es beyond the issue of raising awareness for consumers of literary work of the risks of excessive reading of texts - so to speak - to encouraging diversity in the production of literary texts by protecting creators from all their roots and origins, and preventing the consumerist capitalist system from dominating the process of publishing written works in its various channels which will inevitably end in focusing on works that do not touch the readers' conscience, and provide them with enjoyment and consolation instead of those that shock them and contradict their expectations and demand them to exert effort to understand what might have happened in another side. This matter cannot be left of course to market forces to handle, but must be a public issue and a matter led by national institutions and for which adequate budgets and effective promotion programs are allocated.

What we described is not an excessive intellectual luxury, for facts point beyond doubt that any contemporary society today that possesses a future vision including the promotion of the experience of common living for its citizens and engaging positively in a comprehensive interaction with the global society cannot but employ literary works as an essential part of any strategies it chooses to build formulas of empathy, understanding and acceptance of the other, whether in the society itself or across borders, or on the high seas. Literature in our current days is our most effective, and perhaps last, weapon to face racism, intolerance and terrorism in all its forms in our global village that is shrinking day by day.

* Lebanese-British writer, poet and media professional living in London.